With the first couple of weeks of the year already gone by you may be wondering what we have been up to. Well, Matt has a screen shot for us today:

This is an early shot of the Queens chamber in Empires of the Undergrowth, running in Unreal Engine 4. The little white point-lights will eventually form part of ground decoration which should be appearing in the coming days. Exciting times!

Happy Christmas Eve! I thought we should chat about this most festive of topics, the move to a pre-built engine.

TLDR: Kickstarter showed that PC is the most popular platform for the game so we are focusing on that. We need not be as efficient with our programming for PC and a pre-built engine allows us to give prototypes to the community so they can help in development. Unreal Engine 4 (UE4) has some great features that will help us more rapidly move forward with the project.

Yes we have been unusually quiet this past week. We will try and post things but there will be a little lull until the last week of the month.

But do not fear it is not because we are not doing anything… in fact it is the opposite we are working harder than ever! Reason being we are attending EGX on the 24th and 25th and so we are getting together a game build and preparing promotional material. By the moths end there should be much more available here for you to sink your teeth in to, and in the following month the main site will get an update as well!

So in the past week Liam has been sinking his teeth into the code. He has been exploring ant positioning and calculating ways to spread the ants out often to hilarious outcome. He assures me he has improved it since, but below is one of his early formation algorithms. Joy!

The leaf cutter Majors are huge imposing mini beasts that defend the foraging columns of ants. These strong ants will not be ignored. Tomorrow we will be mentioning how these facts translate into game play in Empires of the Undergrowth.

Large and intimidating for the ant world the leaf cutter cannot be ignored. This weeks focus towers above other ants. Check back tomorrow to find out what this beast does naturally which attracted us to include it in the game.

Keep an eye out on our twitter account @SlugDisco, it gets the updates first!

The African driver truly is a force to be reckoned with in Empires of the Undergrowth. Charging and pushing this ant can shift the tide of the battle through its might alone.

Have you heard of Stomt? Well if you are interested in our development process you should take a look. We often chat about our game mechanics, and how it will all work together. Go on take a look at our Stomt page.